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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Editorial

The Guardian view on The Traitors: television for dark times

The Traitors, filmed at Ardross Castle
‘The cleverness of The Traitors is turning Machiavellian politicking into riveting reality TV.’ Photograph: Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert

Doomy towers, candlelit assignations, whispers in corridors, banishments in the dead of night and a cruel and capricious master – The Traitors has more in common with the prestige historical drama Wolf Hall than you might expect. Based on Hilary Mantel’s Booker prize-winning trilogy following the life of Thomas Cromwell, The Mirror and the Light, its final instalment came to its bloody end in December. In January, the treacherous skies over 16th-century Hampton Court shifted to storm clouds swirling over Ardross Castle in Scotland for the return of the hit reality TV show. Dark times call for dark television.

The Traitors might be a spin on the cosy crime formula (strangers in a country house, murder and amateur sleuthing), but the parallels with Mantel’s trilogy are also striking. The English Reformation divided the faithful, after all. In the politics of the Tudor court and The Traitors castle, it’s all about manipulation, power and self-preservation. Everyone is jockeying for favour, watching their backs, backstabbing and trying to fill the coffers for themselves and their cronies. By the final episode, most of the main characters end up with their heads on the block. All of which makes Claudia Winkleman Henry VIII, but with better hair and knitwear.

“You have no proof,” one of Cromwell’s enemies declares in Wolf Hall. “All you allege is words, words, words.” That’s a line which strikes an ominous note in our own age of disinformation. In both shows, a whispered word can send someone to their doom. The thrill is watching the players entrap their opponents in webs of lies and false confidences, while their own fate hangs on a thread of their own spinning.

From Clytemnestra to Shakespeare’s Brutus, Iago and Macbeth to Harry Potter – “It’s not Snape, it’s Quirrell!”– you can’t beat treachery for a plot twist. Villains and murderers are often punished in tragedy and crime fiction; liars and sneaks ousted early in reality TV shows. But in Wolf Hall and The Traitors we see deceit valorised, and venality and morally slippery behaviour rewarded.

According to one industry insider, The Traitors is edited backwards to create a narrative leading up to the round-table climax. This is a trick also favoured by crime writers: Agatha Christie liked to begin with the murder and work back. There could only be one ending for Cromwell. When Mantel wrote the first words of Wolf Hall – “So now get up” – she realised that she had written the last sentence, she explained. While she started with Thomas at 15, the son of a Putney blacksmith, her trilogy ends where it begins: with Cromwell felled, one blow from death.

Some historians have accused Mantel of being too sympathetic to Henry’s henchman. Despite his crimes, we dread his comeuppance; we are on the scaffold with him. This is Mantel’s genius. The cleverness of The Traitors is turning Machiavellian politicking into riveting reality TV. The fascination in both is seeing the psychological game-playing laid bare. In a world where the bad guys seem to be winning, it’s no wonder a show about ordinary people not playing by normal rules has captured the public imagination.

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